Departures

How The Good Wife Failed One of Its Best Characters

The following post contains frank discussion of plot of The Good Wife Season 6, Episode 20, “The Deconstruction.” If you’re not caught up, now’s the time to leave.

A little over a year after The Good Wife said a bloody good-bye to its leading man Josh Charles, the CBS drama suffered another casting blow. Archie Panjabi, who played early fan favorite Kalinda Sharma, took her sassy investigator boots and endless supply of cute leather jackets and booked herself a one-way ticket out of Chicago. And even though Panjabi’s exit was announced way back in October, the show still managed to fit in plenty of emotional punches as she made her way out the door.

Panjabi was an early breakout star of the series when the show was in its infancy. In fact, before series lead Julianna Margulies became an awards-show staple, it was Panjabi who actually won the show’s first Emmy award back in 2010, and her groundbreaking character—a sexually liberated bisexual woman of color on a network legal show!—went a long way toward putting The Good Wife on the map. But even Kalinda’s most stalwart fans could see that the show had, of late, run out of interesting developments for her.

The dark Season 4 plot involving Kalinda’s ex-husband, Nick, was so famously unpopular, in fact, that the show-runners pulled the plug on it early. “You don’t give James Bond a girlfriend. Some characters you actually don’t want to see that much backstory,” admitted creator Robert King. Kalinda’s character never really recovered from that plotline, and not because Nick and that no-good, very bad ice-cream scene were impossible to come back from. Rather, it was that attitude, that the show would never dive deeply into Kalinda’s personal life again, that severely limited our relationship with the character. Then Josh Charles’s departure last year struck another major blow. The loss of the Kalinda/Will friendship put even more limitations of Panjabi’s chance to show off her range.

So it really shouldn’t come as a shock that Panjabi was ready to move on. Though she never said a bad word about the The Good Wife (why should she? It’s a great show), her stated reason for leaving does pay a nod to the fact that Kalinda went from an enigmatic yet human character to a complete cipher, hopping from bed to bed and adversary to adversary. Panjabi claims that Kalinda’s aggressive sexuality became such an overwhelming part of her character that it bled over into her other work. She describes getting a little overly enthusiastic during a kissing scene on the set of The Fall, the BBC drama she co-stars in with Gillian Anderson.

When I was kissing her, Allan Cubitt, the show’s creator and
director, had to say, “Archie, can you hold back?” because Gillian was
supposed to take me by complete surprise. I didn’t think that I was
very forward in [the scene], but obviously after a while a character
starts to affect you. I thought, “OK, I think it's time to go now.”

It probably is time for Kalinda to go and time for Panjabi to find another character to stretch her in a new direction. And since The Good Wife couldn’t very well kill another main character this season (it’s not Grey’s Anatomy, folks), Kalinda had to leave in a nonviolent way. Doom has been circling her all season in the shape of Chicago drug lord Lemond Bishop and in the instant when Carey told Kalinda that Bishop’s associate, Dexter Roja, was on to her, a flip switched inside her. She may have taken her time to kiss Carey good-bye, call Diane, break into the cash stash that was teased in Season 3, and leave a note for Alicia, but make no mistake about it, Kalinda was already gone.

Which is a shame. Not just because the original core cast is now down to four remaining characters—Alicia, Diane, Carey, and Peter—but because for all its merits, The Good Wife never managed to quite deliver on the promise of Kalinda Sharma. Of all the casualties in this show, the friendship between Alicia and Kalinda (never the same since the Season 2 plotline involving Kalinda’s affair with Peter) is the loss most keenly felt. It’s rare enough to find good friendships between women on television, and even rarer to find it between two women from such different backgrounds. So raise a glass of tequila to the Kalinda/Alicia scenes that might have been, and go ahead and feel Alicia’s pain.